Posted June 18:E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress. "...a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants " in 2005 is still in operation. The office of the Director of National Intelligence conceded only that "technical or inadvertent errors can occur." [James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, NY Times, Jun 17 via CommonDreams]

Posted June 18:Water Risks Ripple Through the Beverage Industry Industries Providers of cold drinks as well as bottled water are beginning to feel the impact of agitation by conservation-minded environmental groups. Multinational SABMiller, for instance, revealed that it takes anywhere from 40 to 140 liters of goundwater to produce each liter of beer. [Martinne Geller, CommonDreams, June 17]

Posted June 18:White House issues landmark climate report. "In the strongest language on climate change ever to come out of the White House, the Obama administration on Tuesday released a 190-page assessment of documented and expected impacts across the United States." NOAA (yay!) was one of the key contributors to the 200-page document. Recommended: section on global change. [Staff, MSNBC, Jun 16]

Posted June 18:PhRMA & the AMA join Forces with Insurers. Statement by AMA: "The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans. A crowd-out of private insurers and the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers..."[TrudyLieberman, ZSPace, June 14]

Posted June 18:Science, the Extavaganza. "The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair [began] last Sunday in Washington Square Park...The festival is the brainchild of Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist and mathematician and best-selling author, and his wife, Tracy Day, a former producer for ABC. They say they thought of the project after attending a science festival in Genoa, Italy, and being impressed by seeing science bubbling through the streets and cafes." Why didn't they invite dcmetrosftp??? [Dennis Overbye, NY Times, June 11]

Posted June 18:Winds of Change. A paper submitted for publication by profs Pryor and Takle seems to show a slowing of observed mean wind speeds over the U.S. over the last 35 years. Schmidt at RealClimate questions the observations and the physical connections between global warming and wind speed and finds no evidence for this effect in the models. Good discussion.[Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann, RealClimate, June 11]

Posted June 18: Water Stress, Ocean Levels to Unleash 'Climate Exodus' According to a report "In Search of Shelter," compiled by specialists from Columbia University, the United Nations University, and CARE International, "Unless aggressive measures are taken to halt global warming, the consequences for human migration and displacement could reach a scope and scale that vastly exceed anything that has occurred before"[Agence France-Presse via CommonDreams, Jun 10]

Posted June 18: Green Energy Overtakes Fossil Fuel Investment, Says UN. Wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted $140bn (£85bn) compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation, with more than a third of the green cash destined for Britain and the rest of Europe. The biggest growth for renewable investment came from China, India and other developing countries". [Terry McAlister, Guardian (via CommonDreams, Jun 3]

Posted June 2: Climate Change Will Soon Make Millions Homeless. A report by by the Italian environmental association, Legambiente, warns that "Environmental refugees are the real emergency of the future. And there is a devastating social emergency behind the environmental and climatic crisis we face today." (There have been attempts to downplay the seriousness of the situation by commnetators in the U.S. who claim that the problem is largely caused by expansion of settlements into vulnerable areas.)[Stefania Milan, IPSnews,May 31]

Posted June 2:Few Rules for Recycling Electronics . There is still no adequate government oversight of "the endless tide of consumer electronics coursing through the American waste stream" and finding its way into poisonous dumps and processing operations in third-world countries, where a small percentage of the metals are reclaimed. [Tom Zeller, NY Times, May 31]

Posted June 2: Dodgy academic PR - science reporting by press release. "Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire took one year’s worth of press releases from 20 medical research centres...23% didn’t bother to mention the number of participants – it’s hard to imagine anything more basic - and 34% failed to quantify their results." [Ben Goldacre (Bad Science), The Guardian, May 30]

Posted June 2:.Don't Blame Pot -- There's No Such Thing as a "Gateway Drug"The less than 10% of pot users who do go on to harder drugs may do so largely because "laws against marijuana have created an unregulated black market, in which criminals control the supply and may attempt to market more dangerous drugs to people who just want marijuana.[Scott Morgan, DRCNet. May 29]

Posted June 2:Climate Change and Intellectual Property Rights?"...the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is gearing up for a fight to limit the access of developing countries to environmentally sound technologies ...fearing that international climate change negotiations, taking place under the auspices of the United Nations, will erode the position of corporations holding patents on existing and future technologies.[Mark Weisbrot, Counterpunch, May23]

Posted June 2:The Climate Lobby's Nonstop Growth. "Makers of sneakers, blue jeans, and computer network servers joined forces late last fall and vowed a bigger push in Congress on climate change... part of a crazy quilt of about 140 businesses and organizations that jumped into the climate change debate on Capitol Hill in the first quarter of this year. Those new players drove a 14 percent increase in the number of interests lobbying on global warming, compared to the same time last year..."[Marianne Lavelle, Publicintegrity.org,May19]

Posted June 2:Science Fiction From Below Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in new ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring. [Mark Engler, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 13]

Posted June 2:Cancer Patients Challenge the Patenting of a Gene. ACLU on behalf of a cancer patient filed suit, challenging the decision to grant a patent on BRAC genes to Myriad Genetics and companies like it. The suit was joined by other patients, activists and professional organizations. [John Schwartz, NY Times, May 12]

Posted June 2: See statement of author, scholar and noted social critic and colleague of Science for the People, Joel Kovel regarding his recent termination by Bard College. Also available at the same link are as well as several of his essays and a podcast of a radio interview.

Posted May 12:U.S. Plans Attack and Defense in Cyberspace Warfare. Power plants, industrial control systems, banks, global markets - all could be infiltrated or sabotaged. The Obama administration in seriously studying cyberwar. And, cyberwar simulations are now part of training atWest Point [David Sanger, et al.,NY Times, Apr 27; Corey Kilganon and Noam Coen, NY Times, 4-part series began May 10]

Posted May 12:Warns U.S. on Cyberwar Plans. A National Academy of Sciences report based on a 3-year study "concludes that the veil of secrecy that has surrounded cyberwar planning is detrimental to the country’s military policy."[John Markoff and Thomas Shanker,NY Times, Apr 29]

Posted May 12: Iraq's Wrecked Environment. "...the dire health consequences of our first radioactive bombing campaign (1991)in this region are coming into focus. Since 1990, the incidence rate of leukemia in Iraq has increased over 600 percent..." [Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, Counterpunch, May 1-3]

Posted May 12: Will Workers Be Left Behind in a Green Transition?"Environmentalists [show]that a transition to clean energy would create far more jobs than it would eliminate... [but] the fact that some people get new jobs provides little solace for the people and communities who have lost theirs." [Joe Uehlein, The Nation, May 5]

Posted May 12:Autism and Toxic Pollution. Now that links between autism and vaccinations have been disproven, there should be a focus on linking air pollution with mercury-induced neurological disorders[Stephen Higgs, Counterpunch, May 5]

Posted May 12: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?"Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors(water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures), a series of government collapses could threaten the world order." [Lester Brown, Scientific American, May, 2009]

Posted May 12:The National Ignition Facility - Why Thomas Friedman Is Wrong. Critiquing a recent Friedman piece in the NYT, tghe author writes "We don't need to repeat the mistakes of the Atoms for Peace program, when the U.S. government enthusiastically encouraged the development of nuclear energy technology all over the world in blithe ignorance of the proliferation dangers this would entail.[Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Apr 27]

Posted May 12: Industry Ignored Its Scientistgs on Climate. "The Global Climate Coalition had in their possession scientific information that substantiated our cautious findings and then chose to suppress that information.”[A. Revkin, NY Times, Apr 24]

Posted May 12:Hurricane-Killing, Space-Based Power Plant. Geo-engineering to the rescue:Orbiting solar power plant beams down heat rays, breaks up hurricane? Read on, if you dare...[Alexis Madrigal, Wired: Science, Apr 17]

Posted Apr 16: Climate Change: We Must Believe We Can Make a Difference. Far from hyping and exaggerating the prospects of climate change, scientists are minimizing the risks so as not to portray disaster as unstoppable and causing the public to give up and opt for business as usual.[James Randerson, The Guardian, via CommonDreams, Apr 14]

Posted Apr 16: Wired Less: Disconnected in Urban America. "Even in some of our most tech-savvy wired cities, millions of people - particularly low-income households, immigrant populations and senior citizens - do not have high-speed Internet in their homes or businesses. "[Megan Tady, CommonDreams, Apr 13]

Posted Apr 16:Terminator Planet -Launching the Drone Wars. Arms races over the last 100 years, and a long and chilling look at weapons now under development ..."the skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock assassins. They will only evolve and proliferate."[Tom Engelhardt, Znet, Apr 11]

Posted Apr 16: Health Risks of Shipping Pollution have been 'Underestimated. "...just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles."[John Vidal, Guardian, via CommonDreams, Apr 10]

Posted Apr 16: Climate Adviser Open to Geo-Engineering to Tackle Global Warming. "The global warming situation has become so dire that Barack Obama's chief scientific adviser has raised with the president the possibility of massive-scale technological fixes to alter the climate known as 'geo-engineering'. John Holdren, who is a member of the president's cabinet, said today the drastic measures should not be 'off the table' in discussions on how best to tackle climate change." [Alok Jha, Guardian, via CommonDreams, Apr 9]

Posted Apr 16: Another Ice Shelf Falls Away. The recent destruction of another piece of the Antarctic ice shelf due to increasing global ocean temperatures won't directly increase in sea level, becaused the ice was already floating, but this an similar events will speed up the seaward flow of land-based ice in the glaciers.[Marcela Valente, IPS, Apr 5]

Posted Apr 16: Will Dams on Amazon Tributary Wreak Global Havoc? Brazil is planning a giant system of dams to generate hydroelectic power on the Xingu River, largest tributary of the Amazon. It will flood 200 square miles and displace 19,000, mostly Indians[Tyler Bridges, McClatchey,via CommonDreams Apr 5]

Posted Apr 2. Twitter Switch for Guardian After 188 Years of Ink. "Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, TheGuardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication." [Rio Paluf, The Guardian, Apr 1]

Posted Apr 2:The Cellulose Ethanol Delusion. To produce an amount of energy equivalent to what is now imported from the Persian Gulf, the U.S. would have to plant an area equal to 8% of its cropland in switchgrass, estimates Robert Bryce.The net energy gain would be close to zero and there would be a large increase in the production of carbon dioxide.[Counterpunch, Mar 30]

Posted Apr 2: Winds of Change Evident in US Environmental Policy. "..there is a sense of urgency by the president and the administrator to address climate change. The EPA is in a very good position to provide technical assistance to the president, to Congress and to the administrator...career officials have spent a couple of years preparing the reports and briefings they are now delivering to Obama officials."[Julie Eilperin, Wash Post, Mar 30, via CommonDreams]

Posted Apr 2: Monsanto Planting Cyber Seeds. Monsanto is paying employees to go into websites such as Twitter and Facebook and make posts supporting the company line - an example of the increasingly common corporate use of social media. [Jeffrey Tomich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar 28, via CommonDreams]

Posted Apr 2:Oil Plagues Sound 20 Years After Exxon Valdez. 'Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound, oil persists in the region and, in some places, "is nearly as toxic as it was the first few weeks after the spill," according to the council overseeing restoration efforts.'[MSNBC, via CommonDreams, Mar 24]

Posted Apr 2: Is the e-voting honeymoon over? Eight Clay County, Kentucky election officials were charged last week with conspiring to alter ballots cast on electronic voting machines in several recent elections."...why have there been so few substantiated cases of these systems being attacked and manipulated in actual elections?" [www.crypto.com/blog • Matt Blaze ]

Posted Apr 2: Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought. What do we jeopardize if we get rid of the printed word? "Web 2.0 and its culture of collaboration supposedly unleashed a sharing society. But we can share only what we own. And as more and more content gets digitized, commercialized, and monopolized, our cultural integrity is threatened. The free and balanced flow of information that gives shape to democratic society is jeopardized." [Emily Walsh, Christian Science Monitor]

Posted Apr 2: France's nuke power poster child has a money melt-down. "The myth of a successful nuclear power industry in France has melted into financial chaos. With it dies the corporate-hyped poster child for a "nuclear renaissance" of new reactor construction that is drowning in red ink and radioactive waste." [Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press, Mar 19]

Posted Mar 15: Scumbag: Ben Goldacre on scientific fraud "...there is a continuum between this naughtiness, and lots of apparently innocent research activity: what should you do with the outliers on the graph?"[The Guardian:Bad Science, Mar 14]

Posted Mar 15: UN Warns of Widespread Water Shortages. The UN's new (release date Mar 16) World Water Development Report says that while water supplies are under threat, "the demand for water is increasing rapidly because of industrialization, rising living standards and changing diets that include more foods, such as meat, that require larger amounts of water to produce"[Martin Mittelstaedt, CommonDreams, via Toronto Globe and Mail, Mar12]

Posted Mar 15: There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser The result of enormous advances in miniaturization and enrgy efficiency in computers and servers has been more than absorbed in increased computer use, so that energy consumed by he computing world is still increasing.[Stan Cox, Counterpunch, Mar 10]

Posted Mar 15: Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile? The private car in any form, be it hybrid or solar, is unsustainable, Harvey Wasserman argues. The system must be rethought. "If the automobile and its attendant freeways continue to metastasize in India, China and Africa as they did in the 20th Century United States, we are doomed." {Counterpunch, Mar 10]

Posted Mar 15: They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street. Many academic physicists have migrated to Wall St pushing the use mathematical prediction models. These contributed to the overconfidence that led to the crisis by "allowing traders to conduct business in a quasi-scientific language and take risks they did not understand."[Dennis Overbye,NY Times, Mar 9]

Posted Mar 15: The Computer Will See You Now The push to computerize medical records comes at a price: "...Doctors in every specialty struggle daily to figure out a way to keep the computer from interfering with what should be going on in the exam room — making that crucial connection between doctor and patient."[Dr. Anne Armstrong-Coben, NYTimes, Mar 5]

Posted Mar 3: America’s Stupid Health Care Debate - keeping some ideas off the table. "...the nation that is closest to the US geographically, culturally, linguistically and economically has, since 1973, had a system of provincially administered single-payer government-run health systems which have kept the country's health costs at about 3/5 of what they are in the US as a percentage of GDP (9.7% vs. 17% for the US), at the same time serving all people and (not surprisingly) achieving better health statistics than the US..." [Dave Lindorff, CommonDreams, Mar 1]

Posted Mar 3: Gore Pulls Slide on Disaster Trends. Al Gore, responding to a wave of criticism, is discarding one of the slides from his evolving presentation on climate change. The issue is connected to two sources of public confusion - spurious time trends in disaster statistics, and false claims that trend in any given time series is due to climate change [Revkin,NY Times, Feb 27]

Posted Mar 3: It's Kindness that Counts. "A psychologist probes how altruism, Darwinism and neurobiology mean that we can succeed by not being cutthroat" - interview with Dacher Keltner, Berkely Social Interaction Lab.[Sci Amer, Feb 26]

Posted Mar 3: Biofuels - Promise or Threat? Skepticism about biofuels - referred to as "agrofuels" among critics in the global South - raises worries about environmental harm, food price inflation and the loss of small farms to global agribusiness.[Rachel Smolker and Brian Tokar, Counterpunch, Feb 24]

Posted Mar 3: Vitamin Pills: A False Hope? "In the past few years, several high-quality studies have failed to show that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, help prevent chronic disease or prolong life."[Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times, Feb 17]

Posted Mar 3: Do We Need a New Internet? "...we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.” [John Markoff, NY Times, Feb 14]

Posted Feb 11: The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam and Corn Dog Update The increase in food prices driven by the diversion of one-third of the corn harvest from the market to make fuel, combined with the sudden drop in oil prices is causing widespread bankruptcies in the ethanol industry.[Robert Bryce, Counterpunch, Feb 5,6]

Posted Feb 11: Canadian Ecosocialist at the World Social Forum Cy Gonick, reporting from the World Social Forum in Belem Brasil, paraphrasing Joel Kovel: The only way to save the planet is to end capital¹s compulsion to grow. Some form of world government is necessary to impose limits to growth which, if effective, would collapse the capitalist system since its existence requires endless accumulation [Climate and Capitalism, Feb 3]

Posted Feb 11: Can Cell Phones Harm Our Health? Ronald Herberman, director of the U. of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, warned his staff that "the risks from cell phone radiation may be higher than we had thought" and advised curbing cell [and cordless] phone use now.This was the first time that a leading U.S. cancer center has raised concern about cell phone use, and the first time a medical journal has published a study indicating behavioral problems in children that may be linked to cell phones. Herberman has since testified before Congress.[Rachel Lieberman, et al.,National Research Center for Women & Families, 7/28/08]

Posted Feb 7:Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs "Forensic evidence that has helped convict thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded and standardized, according to accounts of a [National Academy of Sciences] draft report..." [Solomon Moore, NY Times, Feb 4]

Posted Feb 7:Amazon Destruction Undermines Brazil's Leadership. "Meeting this year's goal is vital for strengthening Brazil in the negotiation of the new global pact for cutting carbon emissions beginning in 2013, replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and will be determined at [next December's] United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen." Satellite observations show a reduction in the rate of deforestation, but part of this is due to increased cutting of smaller parcels.[Mario Osava, Tierramerica via IPS Feb 3]

Posted Feb 7:Counterinsurgency, Anthropology and Disciplinary Complicity An interview with Roberto Gonzalez, author of " American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain" . The Human Terrain System (HTS) has become controversial "because of the ethical and political problems it creates (and ignores) by embedding social scientists with battlefield troops".[David Price, Counterpunch, Feb 3]

Posted Feb 7:The Myth of the Efficient Car: High-efficiency cars will fail to save energy because increased car use and production of more cars and roads will compensate. We must work toward eliminating the private car[Alec Dubro, CommonDreams, Feb2]

Posted Feb 7:Emissions Cut Won’t Bring Quick Relief "Because of the way carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere and in the oceans, and the way the atmosphere and the oceans interact, patterns that are established at peak levels will produce problems like 'inexorable sea level rise' and Dust-Bowl-like droughts for at least a thousand years, the researchers are reporting"[Cornelia Dean, NY Times Jan 26]

Posted Feb 7: Seasonal Affective Disorder - Bad Science? Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" column in the Guardian has come up with a new offender: Seasonal Affective Disorder. What is the most depressing time of the year? He gives examples from the press of conflicting results from a variety of sources. [Guardian, Jan 24]

Posted Jan 26: Birth Control: Obama Lifts Global Gag Rule An executive order from Barack Obama has just "lifted an eight-year ban on U.S. funding for overseas family-planning groups and clinics that perform or promote abortion or lobby for its legalisation."[Jim Loeb, IPS, Jan 23]

Posted Jan 26: The High Price of Clean Cheap Ethanol"Brazil hopes to supply drivers worldwide with the fuel of the future -- cheap ethanol derived from sugarcane. It is considered an effective antidote to climate change, but hundreds of thousands of Brazilian plantation workers harvest the cane at slave wages."[Clemens Höges, Der Spiegel, via Truthout, Jan 23]

Posted Jan 26:Life on Google Earth How one environmental activist was able to use the versatile do-it-yourself mapping power of Google Earth to organize a local community against an environmental threat.[E.B. Boyd, Conscious Choice, via Common Dreams, Jan 23]

Posted Jan 26:Obama Urgent on Warming, Public Cool Andrew Revkin[NYTimes, Jan 22], reports that in the latest annual Pew poll, global warming has slid to last on the list of 20 leading public concerns(Economic issues were at the top). Interesting also was that about the same percentage (~42%) thought it due to human activities as to "long-term planetary trends".

Posted Jan 26: Death Rate of West's Old-Growth Forests Doubled"The mortality rate of old-growth forests across the West has more than doubled in recent decades, and those forests are now losing more trees than they gain, according to a new study that identified the most probable cause as warming temperatures", according to a new report by E. Pennisi in the Jan 23 Science summarized by msnbc.com.

Posted Jan 26:Flush Those Toxins! Eh, Not So Fast. About detoxification programs: Can you say good riddance to those toxic chemicals accumulating in your body by undergoing regimes of stimulants, laxatives and diuretics? [Abby Ellin, NYTimes, Jan 21]

Posted Jan 25:Many Glaciers Will Disappear by Middle of Century and Add to Rising Sea Levels"Figures from the World Glacier Monitoring Service show that although melt rates for 2007 fell substantially from record levels the previous year, the loss of ice was still the third worst on record.". The glaciers in the Himalayas and SE Asia feed all the main river systems in Asia, depended on by the estimated 40% of the world's population.[Juliette Jowit, The Guardian, via Common Dreams,Jan 19]

Posted Jan 26: Book Is Rallying Resistance to the Antivaccine Crusade "A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States."[Donald McNeil Jr, NY Times, Jan 12]

Posted Jan 26:Single-Payer Health Care Would Stimulate Economy According to the National Nurses Organizing Committee, "new findings document for the first time that a single payer system could not only solve our healthcare crisis, but also substantially contribute to putting America back to work and assisting the economic recovery"[John Nichols, Nation, jan 14]

Posted Jan 10:The Problem of Cheap Oil - Be Careful What You Wish For The collapse of oil prices due to the collapse of demand in the current global recession has lead to political instability in oil-producing countries and abandonment of recently-begun projects to increase production. There will thus be another surge in oil prices when a recovering global economy encounters still-inadequate supply [Michael Klare, CommonDreams, Jan 8]

Posted Jan 10: National Health Insurance The Only Solution A concise statement of the arguments behind single-payer health care insurance, starting with the fact that premiums have risen 100% since 2000, and can be projected to consume all household income by 2025[John Geyman,Tikkun, via CommonDreams, Jan 7

Posted Jan 10:The Danger of Green Stimulus Unpopular and ineffective carbon cap-and-trade programs and short-term green jobs stimulus programs must not be allowed to obstruct major efforts to focus on making clean energy cheap, prioritizing major, sustained public investments to drive down the price of green technologies as quickly as possible.[Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins,Huffington Post, via CommonDreams, Jan 7]

Posted Jan 10:Are 'Hail Mary' Technological SolutionsOur Only Hope to Prevent Disastrous Climate Change? "...half of the 80 international specialists in climate science who took part in our survey agreed that the [CO2 emission] situation is now so dire that we need a backup plan that involves the artificial manipulation of the global climate to counter the effects of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.[Steve Connor, Independent UK. Jan 2]

Posted Jan 10:The High and Low Tech of Health Care Innovation Review of two recent books contrasts two types of remedies from opposite ends of the health care spectrum: Computers, remote sensing and robots ( "The Edge of Medicine" by William Hanson) vs. more toilets ("The Big Necessity" by Rose George).[Abigail Zuger, NY Times, Dec 30]

Posted Jan 10, 2009:Airline Flies a 747 on Fuel From a Plant "Air New Zealand tested a jet fuel made from the jatropha plant on Tuesday as the airline searches for an affordable and environmentally friendly alternative to crude oil." [Bettina Wassener, NYTimes]

Posted Dec 26, 2008:Arctic Peoples Claim Their Right to Cold Temperatures '"Terrifying" is the word that best describes the situation of a hunter who is lost on shifting ice, or of the homeowner whose house splits in two when its foundation sinks, says Canadian indigenous leader Mary Simon when asked about the effects of global warming on the Inuit people'. [Stephen Leahy interviews Mary Simon, IPS, Dec 24]

Posted Dec 26:Health Care By and For the People "The Obama transition team is asking you to help create a new health care policy. Really. Host a meeting, invite friends and associates, look at the Obama team's proposal, and let the transition team know what you decide...So far, more than 4,000 meetings are scheduled around the U.S. Here's where you can sign up to lead a session. All the information you need is online, including the moderator's guide and instructions for reporting the results back to the transition team" [Sarah van Gelder, ZSpace, Dec 21]

Posted Dec 26:Poznan Climate Talks: fiddling while the earth burns. "11,000 delegates (including 1,500 corporate lobbyists), 13,000 tonnes of carbon consumed, and two weeks wasted: the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland made only glacial progress towards a new global climate treaty, due to be signed a year from now in Copenhagen."[Oscar Reyes, ZSpace, Dec 17]

Posted Dec 26:The Most Important Number on EarthThe magic number is... 350, as in the target for CO2 reduction given by James Hansen. Bill McKibben hammers home the significance of this number in everyday words in the Dec 16 Mother Jones, via Common Dreams.

Posted Dec 26:Temperature Summaries and SpinThe great thing about complex data is that one can basically come up with any number of headlines describing it - all of which can be literally true - but that give very different impressions."[This] ...post is therefore dedicated to cutting through the hype and looking at the bigger picture.[Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, Dec 16] See also: A Cooler Year on a Warmer Planet Good graphs, more on the distorted interpretations out there.[Andrew Revkin, NYT, Dec 17]

Posted Dec 26:Cluster Bomb Treaty and The World's Unfinished Business. The accord once ratified by 30 nations will go into effect in 6 months. The US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan - a group that includes the biggest makers and users of the weapon - "neither attended the Ireland negotiations, nor did they show any interest in signing the agreement". [Ramzy Baroud, Common Dreams Dec 13]

Posted Dec 12:Toronto Stood Up to Bottled Water Industry. "Toronto's decision last week to ban the sale and distribution of bottled water on city premises not [only].. banned an environmentally destructive product, but that included a commitment to ensuring access to tap water in all city facilities. Toronto is now the largest city in the world to pass such far-reaching regulations controlling the distribution of bottled water on municipal property and promoting the use of publicly delivered tap water. [Tony Clarke, Toronto Star and Common Dreams, Dec 11]